A literary agent I follow told the story of a long argument her autoreply had with a would-be author. She’d set up the outbound email while out of town and apparently an author who queried her with his book took offense to it. He replied back in frustration that he didn’t get a personal response. Her autoreply sent back another automated message, which he then in increasing anger kept responding to.
Are you creating a voicemail greeting for your entire company or team? These business voicemail greetings will do the trick.
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Yes! I remember reading here the phrase: the default mode of clever is asshole. Meaning when trying to be clever backfires, you end up just looking like an asshole. I’ve given up the need to get laughs at my clever sense of humor while at work. I really hope that out of office message is for internal emails only, because the risk of this landing badly is too high.
I will be out of the office from DATE LEAVING to DATE RETURNING. I wanted to assure you that I have handed off all important information off to DELEGATE’S NAME while I am away. Should you have any questions or need anything during this time, please feel free to contact DELEGATE’S NAME and they will do their best to assist you.
As a matter of courtesy – and to give you the peace of mind needed to be present wherever you are going (either away from the office or on vacation) – you should send each of your clients a simple email to let them know you’ll be away. Below I’ve offered some sample text for to you use as a template. Feel free to make it a TextExpander snippet, Gmail canned response, or whatever. Just use it (or something like it). Please.
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My department still doesn’t allow us to send OOO auto-replies to external recipients because of one incident years ago (a customer tried to contact a sales rep about an urgent order, got the rep’s auto-reply, and in their ensuing panic, somehow got escalated all the way up to the company president). Any external emails we get are auto-forwarded to a centralized mailbox and (ostensibly) handled by another rep while we are out. It bothers me to know that my external contacts won’t get a reponse from me while I’m out and may think I’m just ignoring them.
Literally just “Please note that (date) is a public holiday in (country). I will not be checking my inbox until (next working day).”
First things first: let’s go over the basics of an OOO email. In your away message, you typically include the following: A quick “I’m out of the office” phrase. The date or time range you’ll be out. Who to reach out to in case the sender needs immediate attention. A sign-off.
To keep up to date with what’s happening at [Company], follow us on Facebook/ Twitter/ LinkedIn/ Instagram (You’ll like our posts on Facebook.)
The first part of the process is to click on the Settings button in the top right-hand corner the Gmail dashboard, before clicking See All Settings.
By making this information public, you have unwittingly given a hacker everything they need to complete a Business email Compromise (BEC) scam. In these BEC attacks, the hacker commits fraud by pretending to be a senior employee and will attempt to coerce the recipient into complying with a fraudulent request – such as wiring company money.
Using autoresponder emails when you are not available at the office is a part of the professional communication between business associates. That said, you should be careful about the information you are sharing in your OOO messages.
Once I got an auto reply from a stakeholder on a project that said something to the effect of “Thanks for contacting me. Due to the large volume of email I receive, I don’t read them all. If I haven’t responded within 3 business days, please try again.”
[Your Name] said he/she will be back on [date]. I’m sure he/she will respond to your message as soon as he/she’s back. But if your concern is urgent, please send an email to [contact name] at [contact email]. He/She is not an autoresponder, I promise. He/She will take care of your needs. Good luck when you return next year. You will have plenty of emails to respond to! But for the meantime, be merry and have fun during the ho-ho-holidays! Recent Posts Sysgen – The End of An Era… Sysgen RPO – The Start of A Legacy Treat Your Recruitment Email Like A Marketing Strategy Sysgen names Rockstar Recruiter and Rookie of the Year at Annual Awards Celebrating 27 Years of Recruiting Excellence Sysgen Celebrates 27 Years of Tech Recruiting Excellence SmartCompany Plus Smart50 Awards Business Advice Retail Startups Webinars Five options for your Christmas out-of-office message you probably shouldn’t use
Before you put your coworker’s email address on your out-of-office message, get their approval and discuss a plan for handling requests and passing responsibilities back when you return.
I’m out of the office from 11/11 to 11/17 and I will not be checking my emails. It’s likely your note will be swallowed in a sea of inbox banality, never to be seen again. If you require a response, please resend your email after 11/18. For urgent editorial issues, please contact the channel or features editor responsible for that content. If you are Barack Obama, text me bro. We need to talk.